Category Archives: Travel

My son loves the beach at Sainte Anne la Palud; wild dunes stretch towards a distant headland and the sand is perfect for building his creations. It’s why we return here at the end of our holiday in Brittany.

The beach is vast at low tide

Last time we came it was a high spring tide and the beach was just a sliver of sand strewn with prickly cockles, sea potato urchins and even a dead eel. Now the sea is at its very lowest, a bare glimmer on the horizon. I walk towards distant low cliffs, expecting to find mussel beds around the exposed headland.

If Cornwall has a cousin, it must be Brittany. The family traits are unmistakeable in the culture, language and, of course, the rock pools, so it seems inevitable that I am drawn to the high headlands, sweeping dunes and granite boulders of the Cornouailles region. With the sun bouncing off the multi-coloured fishing boats behind the harbour wall at Trévignon and the tide dropping, I wander under the towering man-made supports of the lifeboat slipway and nearly drop my camera in excitement.

Oysters. Pacific oyster on right.

There are oysters clinging to the seawards side, oodles of them and they’re nearly all the native species, now rare at home due to overfishing and the invasion of the Pacific oyster. Not only that, but among them, reaching out like flowers towards the light are pale pink Devonshire cup corals. At home, I see these occasionally at the back of dark wave-battered overhangs, but these are in the open so I can get in close and marvel at every spoke of their delicate wheel-like markings. It’s a magical moment and I long for a camera with a macro strong enough to capture them.Continue reading Cornish Rock Pools on Tour – Trévignon, Brittany→